Explore Amazon Simple Storage Service

In this article we will explore about Amazon Simple Storage Service and their use cases. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is storage for the Internet. You can use Amazon S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time, from anywhere on the web.It is highly scalable, reliable, fast and inexpensive data storage.

As first step we will learn the S3 terminology like bucket, object, key and ACL.

Bucket: Collection (container) of objects. Up to 100 per account. Names up to 255 characters long.

Object: Objects are the fundamental entities stored in Amazon S3. Objects consist of object data and metadata. They are Individually addressable data item. Any number per bucket and per account. An object is uniquely identified within a bucket by a key (name) and a version ID.

Key: A key is the unique identifier for an object within a bucket. Every object in a bucket has exactly one key.

Now we will follow the below steps to create bucket and upload the objects to Amazon S3.

Step 1: From the AWS console select S3. The below screen will appear. Click on the “Create Bucket” button to create a bucket.

Step 2: After clicking on the “Create Bucket”, give the bucket name and select the region from the drop down.

Step 3: The bucket will get create and you can see the bucket properties.

Step 4: Click on the bucket name on the left side to upload the objects into the bucket. Click on “Upload” button to upload the objects.

Step 5: After selecting the files/docs to upload click on “Start Upload” button.

Step 6: Select the object from the left side pane and see the object properties. Every object has its own public url to access it.

Step 7: Set the permissions to the object to restrict the access. In this case we are going to provide access to everyone.

Now you can take the object url and access the uploaded file.

Usecases:In the present data world lot of data sharing/uploading sites are using AWS s3 service. For example to host the blogs, static web sites and image/file hosting services like Instagram, sugmug etc…

In the coming article we will discuss how we can design a system using AWS s3 to serve the static content. Until then “Happy Cloud Computing !!!“.